Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV.
Lesbia’s Correspondence, and the Penumbra of the Dream Upon Letitia.
It will readily be supposed that letters began to pass between the bosom friends without much delay. Some extracts from their communications may be more suggestive than the tittle-tattle which most young ladies still wrote to each other, even at the date of our story’s outset.
No. 1.—Letitia to Lesbia, dated New York, Oct. 189—.
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‘Well, as I was telling you, as we got into the “rolling forties” off Newfoundland, it blew pretty stiff from the north-west almost a head wind. This floored half the passengers, but I am a good sailor and did not mind it. I passed some of the time in the smoking-room—I smoke a good deal at sea, to the scandal of the old fogies of propriety. Among the men I used to meet there were three Irish Nationalists, who gave me an eye-opening about the dangerous state of feeling that is growing again in their country, and still more on this side of the water, since the change of Ministry in England. As girls like you and me, sweet Lesbia, have no national resentments, looking upon all our sex as belonging to one human family, I shall not be misunderstood by you if I say that there is reason to fear breakers ahead. The Irish ivy is overgrowing our walls, it is becoming yearly of more weight in our national councils,—at all events, our foreign policy; and the end can only be a rupture between Jonathan and Paddy on the one side and John Bull on the other, unless the three can manage to hit off some sensible arrangement to the satisfaction of all. I have a notion of my own that the question is not one of simple politics; its Celtic element is indispensable to the solidarity of the British race, and if that be alienated, the backbone of national power will have been taken out. But I am tired of politics: there has been little else talked in my hearing since you and I parted.
‘A bad sign of the times is the extravagant taste displayed by the new fashions in ladies’ dresses, which burlesque the form divine more than ever. And yet the same people who submit to be made such guys of in sacrifice to their only real deity, La Mode, are, or pretend to be, shocked at beautiful studies in the nude, whether in painting or sculpture. Upon the whole, I am driven to doubt whether it would not be better for society that all women should be openly licentious, than be thus strait-laced, prudish, and hypocritical. However, the point will perhaps be settled without your or my intervention; we can but wait and see, perhaps not wait very long.
******** No. 1.—Lesbia to Letitia, dated Dulham, Frogmore, Nov. 189—
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‘My short and imperfect acquaintance with the political question, Letty, leads me to much the same conclusions as you draw. It is to be feared that the Bungling party, now in power, may land us in a catastrophe. But sufficient unto the day, etc. Now about the other matter. The perversion of women to which you refer is, I think, capable of explanation. It is a survival, one of the many useless survivals in the evolution of humanity. We have numerous instances of useless survivals in our own persons. There is, for example, the beard, which a large proportion of men in all ages have rid themselves of by shaving, and which women generally do not grow. Our hair and our nails require clipping; we use artificial soap and brushes and sponges; in short, civilised man has to eliminate by art the encumbrance of various survivals or inheritances from his lower physical history. Analogously, we have also moral survivals, which the progress of enlightenment calls upon us to exterminate. We cannot help having inherited them from our lower ancestry, be they apes or what not, but we can exterminate them by culture, and if we fail to do so, we fail to fulfil the mission of our race,—we are retrograding, tending downwards. The subjection of women and the habits of mind which that subjection engenders in women, is the most prominent and the most pernicious of all the moral survivals from a lower world. It is natural only in the sense in which it is natural for everyone to be dirty and ignorant. But the practical difficulty in emancipating our sex is that of rousing women themselves to be earnest in the work. It is the old story of the man in the Bastille; after he had passed a number of years immured in his cell, he felt uncomfortable out of it. And little can be done, I fear, with those of us who have reached middle life under the old bondage. It is the education of young girls that must be attacked, as my uncle has attacked it in my case, and as your friends have evidently in yours, Letty. That has certainly been done to some extent also in the best girls’ schools and colleges which late years have brought into being. Still there is a deplorable backsliding and want of wholeness in the movement, as evinced by the fashions in dress against which we both declaim. The old social disease is very deep-seated, and may need some drastic remedy. A new broom sweeps clean, and it seems to me that the present atmosphere of society bears signs that some great event is at hand to do the work. What form it will take exactly none of us can tell, but the signs are in the sky.’
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As the American girl read these last lines of her English friend’s, she felt a swimming in the head quite unusual with her. Someone in the room at her house, where she was conning over Lesbia’s letter, interrupted her reading to ask a question, but her memory and comprehension collapsed; she could only stare stupidly at the speaker. And as she gazed thus vacantly, the room and its furniture melted away before her, and there rose in its place the deck of the Milford steamer entering Cork Harbour, with herself and Lesbia and Mr Bristley upon it, looking up at Roche’s Tower looming grim through the fog. The experience was as unpleasant as new to her, but it was over in a minute, and Letitia sprang up and went out of the room, edifying her companion by the remark, ‘Guess philosophy’s a fine thing, but at times a blue pill’s a finer, and I'll just put myself outside one.’